Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (40 page)

“Woody,” Siân Phillips sighs. “They upset Woody Allen on the set—they were not nice to him. They used to rewrite the script every day, and
Sellers was very supercilious with him. ‘We are way beyond rehearsing, you
know. I’ll be in my dressing room.’ There was a lot of pulling rank. Woody
got so neurotic he wouldn’t even come out of his bedroom.”

“Met the cast in person today,” Allen wrote in his diary, which he later
published as publicity for the film. “Sellers and I eyed one another carefully.
I think he senses in me a threat to his current position as cinema’s leading
funnyman. I tried to make him feel at ease and I think I succeeded. He
seemed more preoccupied with his wife than with my ideas.”

Sellers and O’Toole indeed began to tinker with Allen’s script. Tinkering soon turned into wholesale reworking. “Scenes have been taken away
from Woody and . . . reworked and repolished by Sellers and O’Toole,”
Charles Feldman reported on December 2. “I spent the last three days with
Woody getting a new Bateau Mouche scene, then I spent endless time
with Sellers getting him to approve it.” In addition, Sellers thoroughly
rewrote the scene in which Dr. Fassbender and Michael muse drunkenly
in a lonely bar:

M
ICHAEL:
(drunk) I need help.

F
RITZ:
(drunk) Don’t mention dat verd to me—“
help
.” Dat is vat I
need—dat
help
, oh God, how I need dat ting! (Confidingly:) You
know I am in love vit a patient? (Broadcasting:)
I am in love vit a
patient!
(Casually:) Ya got a minute?

Then Peter wrote—and Donner shot—three entirely new scenes that
weren’t in Allen’s original script at all. This was no longer on the level of
spontaneous improvisation.

• • •

“You’ll like zis group analyzis,” Dr. Fassbender tells Michael early in the
film. “It’s a real
frrreak
show! If it gets dull ve sing songs!”

Clive Donner, asked how Fassbender’s character was developed, responded that “it evolved a little from discussions we had, but that was
Peter’s idea. He would keep coming up with ideas, and I’d say, ‘Are you
sure, Peter?’ And he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. . . .’ The character
was trying to be young again—trying to be a mod to keep up with it all.
It’s a search for youth.”

At Michael’s first group session, Peter as Fassbender slaps his hands
together and rubs them expectantly as the camera tracks back from a close-up. “And now, group! Whose e-
mo
-zhen’l problems shall we discuss today?”
“Me! Me! Me! Mine! Me!” they all shriek. “I’ve been coming here ten
months and we haven’t discussed my problem
once
yet,” one woman complains, but Dr. Fassbender offers no apologies. “Well,” he replies, bored
and irritated, “perhaps if you’d be kind enough to tell us what your problem
is then ve could all have a go at dis-gussing it or something.” A little later,
a chubby patient acts out physically by attacking Michael for no apparent
reason. Dr. Fassbender, outraged, calls him a “great fat Moby Dick” and,
launching into song—“Ven it’s
spring time
in Vi-
en
-
na
”—begins whipping
him across the back with a bouquet of flowers.

Dr. Fassbender’s lust-object patient, Renée (Capucine), paces the room
while rattling off a lengthy speech, which ends, “You see, I can’t help it.
I’m a physical woman! I feel guilty about it, but I come from a family of
acute nymphomaniacs. That includes my father and my two brothers.” Dr.
Fassbender (visibly aroused): “Vhy don’t ve all take off our clothes, it’s so
modern. . . .”

But it is Liz (Paula Prentiss), the suicidal stripper, who takes it furthest.
Profoundly unstable, she explains her “semi-virgin” status to Michael—“Here I’m a virgin, in America I’m not”—and suddenly announces, “I feel
faint. Would you excuse me for a minute? I’m going into the bathroom to
take an overdose of sleeping pills.”

“I thought she was joking,” Michael tells the doctor summoned to
revive her. “It was all poems and ‘Don’t touch me’. . . .”

After her second suicide attempt (sparked by Michael’s having told her
that no, he didn’t love her), the physician responding to the call presents
her with a commemorative watch: “Mademoiselle, the boys of the Emergency Suicide Board voted you this gold watch for unusual devotion.”

• • •

With the strange and disturbing production of
What’s New Pussycat?
finally winding down just before Christmas and nobody having died,
Charlie Feldman parceled out holiday gifts to the cast and principal
crew—Hermes cigarette boxes all around. Peter had already received his
own special present from Feldman two weeks earlier—a new red Rolls
Royce Silver Cloud III.

Feldman had been growing worried about two things in particular:
Peter was far exceeding his contractual obligations on
What’s New Pussycat?
by working longer hours than required and by substantially rewriting the
script without additional compensation. He was also showing signs of depression. Feldman, telling United Artists that he had been anticipating
problems and thought he’d found a way to circumvent them, voluntarily
offered Sellers a new car to keep him happy. “His enthusiasm thereafter
was incredible and he has worked like a dog since,” Feldman reported.

The Rolls was not Peter’s first choice. He had originally suggested a
new Ferrari Superfast. But they couldn’t get one in time, so he settled on
the cheaper Silver Cloud, which was available right away.

He had to have it.

• • •

“She looks just like her father!” Britt wrote to Charlie Feldman, thanking
him for the congratulatory flowers he had sent to the proud parents of a
baby girl. “As you can imagine, Peter and I are just thrilled with her!”

Victoria Sellers was born on January 20, 1965, at the Welbeck Street
Clinic in London. Her parents had moved into the Dorchester after their
return from Paris, specifically to be close to the clinic. “When my water
went and I felt the first pangs,” Britt reports, “Sellers whisked me from the
hotel to the clinic in a flash. My suitcase was already packed.”

Then Peter made his exit: “Unceremoniously he dumped me on the
steps of the clinic and promptly disappeared without so much as taking one
step inside the door.” Whatever the cause of this, his second birthing abandonment—fear, revulsion, somebody’s opening night at an exclusive
club?—Peter once again proved unable to support his wife emotionally,
particularly when she expected it.

But in the morning, with his daughter safely born, Peter was “proud
as punch.” After scooping the tiny girl up in his arms, he was overcome by
joy. “Thank God she is safely here,” he said.

• • •

They were not destined to be a stay-at-home family, and swinging London
in 1965 was not a stay-at-home kind of place. With Victoria only a few
weeks old, Peter and Britt left her in the care of her nurse, where she was
to remain through much of her childhood, and turned up at the Cool
Elephant, a private nightclub, to hear a performance by Mel Torme. Princess Margaret joined them. The comedian Dudley Moore was there, too;
he got up on stage at one point and played the piano for Mel. London
being essentially a small town of hipsters, mods, models, international stars,
and the Beatles, all of whom knew one another, it was not surprising that
relationships were becoming notoriously intertwined. Also present at the
Cool Elephant that night were David Frost and his girlfriend, who happened to be Peter’s ex-girlfriend, Janette Scott, who happened later to marry
Mel Torme.

The jet set was, in a word, flying. In April, Peter and Britt skipped over
to Blue Harbor, Jamaica, where they visited Noel Coward. (“Peter Sellers
and his wife came over to lunch the other day and were sweet,” Coward
wrote in his diary.) They were back in London in time for the queen’s
thirty-ninth birthday bash, hosted by Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace. The evening began with everyone—Elizabeth, Philip, Margaret,
Snowdon, Peter, Michael Bentine, and Harry Secombe—attending a performance of
Son of Oblomov
, a West End comedy starring Spike Milligan.
The actor Peter Eyre remembers that particular night all too well:

“Basically, the play was Spike Milligan humiliating a lot of actors, of
which I was the youngest. (It was a straight play, but it began to go wrong
in rehearsals. They didn’t know what to do, so they began adding gags.)
On the Queen’s birthday, the Royal Family all came to the theater. Princess
Margaret and Snowdon brought Peter Sellers along, and he did a sort of
double act from the stalls with Spike Milligan on the stage.” The other
performers, including Eyre, found themselves upstaged not only by the
show’s erratic star but by a member of the audience. Eyre resented it, though
the audience itself seems to have been delighted. Still, Eyre may have a
point: “I thought that Milligan was, like most comedians, totally selfish.
Comedians want it to be just them and the audience. They don’t want
other people.”

• • •

Peter and Britt were traveling in a closed circle of celebrities and growing
rather used to hanging out with the royals. One of Peter’s young fans used
to call him at the office. Hattie Stevenson remembers answering the phone
and finding the teenage Prince Charles on the line: “You’d suddenly get
the heir-apparent on the other end of the phone talking Bluebottle at you.”
Charles was a guest at Peter’s estate, Brookfield, as well.

And the royals reciprocated. Peter and Britt were invited to Windsor
Castle to go pheasant shooting, an occasion that provided Peter with the
opportunity to outfit himself with a new £1,200 Purdy 12-bore shotgun
and a fine hunting costume topped by a deerstalker. With practice, Peter
wasn’t a bad shot. It was thrilling to watch birds drop out of the sky at his
instigation, and the congratulations of Princes Philip and Charles didn’t
hurt either. Peter and Britt also enjoyed teatime with Elizabeth II. The
queen arranged the cups and saucers; Britt discussed Sweden; Phillip, Peter,
Margaret, Tony, Charles, Princess Anne, and the Duke and Duchess of
Kent put their two pence in. After tea was finished, they all played charades.

They were hanging out with the Beatles, too. George Harrison became
a particularly good friend to Peter over the next few years; they shared an
interest in Eastern religions. At first, Peter’s fame was such that even the
Fab Four were daunted by him. “We met him at numerous parties and
different things,” Harrison later said, “but at that time we were more in
awe of him because of our childhoods and the Goons. We just loved the
Goons. It was the greatest thing we’d ever heard. I remember thinking that
we’d met all these film stars and presidents and kings and queens. . . . But
there were very few people who really impressed me.” Peter Sellers was one
who did.

When the Beatles won two Grammy awards that year—Best New Artist(s) and Best Vocal Performance by a Group (for “A Hard Day’s
Night”)—it was Peter who presented it to them in a videotaped sequence.
John, Paul, George, and Ringo could not attend the proceedings in person
because they were in London filming
Help,
1965, with Richard Lester.

After Sellers gave the Beatles their awards, John Lennon responded
Goonishly by launching into a speech in nonsense French; the others
followed suit, and the whole thing ended up slipping into “It’s a Long Way
to Tipperary.”

• • •

Although Peter had filmed his scenes in
Dr. Strangelove
two years earlier,
the film was still very much in the news in the spring of 1965. It had been
Columbia’s biggest hit of 1964, pulling in the then-sizable sum of $5 million in the United States alone. Now it was up for four Oscars, all in top
categories: Best Actor (Peter), Best Director (Kubrick), Best Screenplay
Based on Material from Another Medium (Kubrick, Southern, and
George), and Best Picture.

It lost all four.

My Fair Lady
was named Best Picture,
Becket
Best Screenplay, George
Cukor Best Director (for
My Fair Lady
), and Rex Harrison Best Actor (also
for
My Fair Lady
).

Dr. Strangelove
fared better at the BAFTA gala, where it won the
BAFTA Film Award, the award for Best British Film, and the award for
Best Film from Any Source.

Peter, however, lost again in the category of Best Actor—to none other
than Richard Attenborough for
Guns at Batasi
.

A
script by Neil Simon, direction by Vittorio De Sica, a flamboyant and
multi-personality role for himself, sunny Italian locations filmed in
Technicolor, and even a featured part for Britt. Peter’s next film project
looked promising. After all of Brookfield’s fits and starts,
After the Fox
(1966), a heist spoof, would be Brookfield’s first actual production.

Given her glamour, Britt Ekland was continually offered film roles, but
Peter, in a mix of professional expertise and jealousy, tended to talk her out
of them. One nixed project, for example, was to star Dean Martin. “Do
you really want Dean Martin breathing bourbon fumes all over you?” he
asked his wife. Britt’s role in the De Sica film had one distinct advantage:
Peter was the star of the film and would therefore have to be there all the
time.